Can't stop checking your email?

For professionals and older folks it is email, for kids it is their text messages, for sales people and politicos it is the blackberry. The geeks have their "tweets". Whatever it is, the current concern (or latest recurrence of the concern) is that we're checking these things too often. Why? And what happens? I was asked this by a CBC reporter and since I couldn't get in to talk to him in the studio sent in these thoughts.

Me on my phone

Tod,

You raise an interesting question and one that has been explored to some extent in both the media and in scholarship (although mainly in the media and the "scholarship" is a bit speculative at this point). I am sure you've seen what bloggers/pundits have to say about this but here are some touchpoints that are worth covering:

First of all, you have two questions, I think. The first is, WHY are people so attached/distracted/addicted to their email or tweets or whatever? The second is WHAT HAPPENS to them when they engage in this behaviour?

Leaving aside the thorny question of whether this is really an addiction or not - and the potential diminishing of the value of language when we clump crack addicts and twitter fiends in the same camp, not to mention the stasis that that sort of language dilution entails - the first question has a number of possible answers. Many of these answers are not so much based on new research as they are projections of past research on media use patterns onto the new media form. That's what researchers do when they are called up by reporters and asked to make a quick comment :->

So, why?

1. habituation - a simple explanation and certainly something that we see in many forms of sentient life, including humans. If you do something often enough it becomes an unthinking, reflexive habit. I saw a horse, trained in horse logging, that when in the presence of a chainsaw couldn't help backing up to the fallen tree even though it just happened to be in his paddock and he wasn't even wearing a halter, let alone a harness. Humans become habituated to physical actions, too. I used to look left when I shifted my old VW microbus. I have no idea why, but it was an almost unbreakable habit.
2. stimulus/response - this, too, is a trait of many organisms, including plants. Humans will respond to a stimulous and if it involves a noise and a flashing light, well, we'll like it all the better. Check out the slot machines in Vegas if you don't believe me. If there is even the remotest possibility of a "treat," there is almost no telling how often we'll keep coming back.
3. status - this starts to get into some higher order thinking, but the argument goes like this: I am an important person, so I get important email and when I check my email, I am going to give back important answers and people will recognize how important I am. For example, some professors might compose a long email to a reporter, answering their questions, even though there is no real obligation to do that. Some people have speculated that this is part of the (initial) appeal of a blackberry: it is a status symbol and only important people get these things.
4. self construction - somewhat related, but I think sufficiently distinct from the "Status" argument, is the presentation of self argument building on Goffman's work on how we use communication and communication media to "create" a self for ourselves. The tweets we post, the blogs we comment on and post, the profiles and status messages we write up on Facebook, all add to a constructed self that is being created and recreated every minute. In a fast-paced anonymous world the desire to distinguish ourselves from the pack is strong.
5. obsession - for some people these are manifestations of psychological problems, like obsessive compulsive disorder. If they weren't doing that they would be washing their hands over and over, perhaps. Most of us, however, are a bit removed from that level of compulsion and could stop any time we wanted to.
6. utility - There is at least one simple explanation for some of this: it is useful. Like many forms of information gathering and processing, we do it because we get information we can use in our daily life and get things done.
7. fun - the other benign explanation is entertainment. Perhaps we are just looking for a laugh and we get that from our email/tweets/facebook pages. Maybe our job is boring and we just need some distraction.

So what happens?

If you stick with my last two, and perhaps the "self construction" explanation, I think you could decide that nothing much is happening or what is happening isn't all bad. The habituation and stimulus response and status explanations might be a bit pathetic, but again not too dangerous. The obsession one, obviously, should be treated and their is both therapy and medication to help cope with true obsessive compulsive disorder "OCD".

Less dramatic, but probably much more far reaching in its consequences, we have the multitasking/distraction problem. This falls into two domains, and both have some pretty strong research supporting them:

1. distractions are pernicious to performance because it takes a long time to get "back on track" after a distraction. Productivity in a workplace environment or critical/reflexive thinking in a social or political environment suffers. This is bad for business, bad for personal development, bad for democracy, even. Research has shown that a distracting email can result in up to 20 minutes of lost work, even when you get back to the task at hand.
2. multitasking may actually be harmful to our brains when taken to extremes. There is some research (recently notorious by inclusion in an Atlantic article) to suggest that people who multitask for long periods of time suffer impairment of capabilities and diminishment of key brain structures.

Obviously there are some problems with the "multitasking is inherently bad" argument, since many common activities are probably not a single task but several tasks happening at once (cooking and driving come to mind). Nevertheless, it is wise to be cautious about your distractions and keep them to a minimum. Most people find that a certain amount of distraction can be helpful but beyond that it starts to be corrosive.

Best of luck with your story.

...r